The Heifers She Bought in the Sandhills

When we divorced, the judge let Kinley say where she wanted to live. She was thirteen. She sat in a little room with a woman from the county and said she wanted to live with her mom on the place, with the cattle, and see her dad on weekends.

Troy took that hard. He took it like she’d picked a side in a fight, when all she’d picked was the barn she’d grown up in and the dog she slept with.

Since then he’d been short with her on the phone. He’d missed two of her 4-H meetings he said he’d come to. And now he’d sat in the Sterling sale barn and spent close to two thousand dollars he didn’t have to spare, to show a fourteen-year-old girl he still had the last word.

He’d shown her, all right.

That evening, after Kinley went out to do chores, I sat at the kitchen table with my phone and my old logbook from the truck. I’ve hauled for half the ranchers between Sterling and the Dakota line. Somebody, somewhere, had a heifer for sale.

I called Ivo Kucera first, because I always call Ivo first.

Ivo is seventy-eight years old and runs about three hundred cows on the place his father homesteaded north of Ogallala. I’ve hauled his calves to market every fall for eleven years. He’s never once been late with a load or a check.

“Shayla,” he said when he picked up, the way he always does, like it’s a pleasant surprise. “You calling to tell me fuel went up again?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I’m calling to ask you a favor.”

I told him the whole thing. The two years of babysitting money, the little black heifer, the hand going up across the ring. I told him about the four seventy after she’d already quit.

Ivo was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped.

“Troy did that,” he said finally. “In front of everybody.”

“In front of everybody.”

He let out a breath. “Well. I don’t have a heifer I’d sell for that money, and you know it. Bred heifers are going for over three thousand this fall. Open ones aren’t much better.”

“I know it,” I said. “I just thought you might hear of something.”

“I’ve heard of something,” he said. “You know Dorcas Lund? Up in the Sandhills, on the old Lund place?”

I knew the name. Her husband had died the winter before, and I’d heard she was selling out.

“Her dispersal’s a week from Saturday,” Ivo said. “On the ranch. She’s selling everything, cows, bulls, the hay, the old Farmall. And she told the auctioneer she wants the last two heifers sold to kids only. Youth bidders. Nobody over eighteen. And she’s capped both at eleven hundred a head, because they’re going to kids and not to a feedlot.”

I sat up straight in my chair.

“Her girls showed cattle when they were little,” Ivo said. “Dorcas always said a kid ought to have a fair shot at a start. Those two are out of her best cow family. They’re bred to calve the end of March.”

“Ivo,” I said.

“I’ll be there,” he said. “I’m buying some of her bred cows anyhow. You bring that girl and I’ll stand at the rail with her.”

When Kinley came in from chores with her cheeks red from the cold, I was still sitting at the table with the phone in my hand.